{ "article": { "title" : "Malak Mattar: I couldn’t see colors anymore", "author" : "Malak Mattar, Céline Semaan", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/malak-mattar", "date" : "2025-09-08 10:10:59 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/malak-mattar--war-1.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "CÉLINE: Where are you now? In which part of the world?MALAK: I live in London now.CÉLINE: How was your show?MALAK: It was a group show with other artists, mostly Turkish and Lebanese. It was a really fun experience. The theme was about home and belonging.CÉLINE: I wanted to ask you, in your work, there is a palpable sense of home, of belonging. As a Palestinian artist, how do you navigate the line between your personal and the political in your paintings?MALAK: I don’t feel like there’s anything to align between the personal and the political, because everything I do, whether I like it or not, is political, but I always make sure that it reflects my own personal thoughts, my personal feelings, my family, everything in my present life…CÉLINE: Your art has traveled beyond Gaza; it’s reaching international audiences. What does it mean for you to share your art with the rest of the world, to share how it has been for you as a Palestinian person?MALAK: It feels like a beauty being postponed, and it’s like growing up. You grow up as an artist, and you’re given this title, not only as an artist, but as a voice.Every time I speak to my family back home, it’s like, what are you working on? Are you producing paintings? Can you share our struggle? Can you share what we are going through? Can you make our voices heard? When my work reaches beyond my studio, it feels like I’m doing what I can, I’m fulfilling my role as a creative.CÉLINE: Do you feel like it is your responsibility as an artist to carry the voices and the stories of your people?MALAK: Absolutely. Throughout our history, art has always reflected and documented the political struggle, starting with artists who painted the Nakba, painted their personal stories in 1948 when they were displaced. I found, while growing up in Palestine, an art scene that was blooming and expanding despite the restrictions [by the Occupation] on art materials. Artists have always been very resilient… making alternatives to paints, by using natural pigments, alternatives to canvas, by using other paper, and other materials. Every time art supplies were banned or restricted, artists came up with alternatives. Creation is urgent in the context of Palestine.CÉLINE: Where did you grow up?MALAK: In Gaza.CÉLINE: Who are the artists who have inspired you?MALAK: I was exposed to Western art in my family house: Van Gogh’s flowers, Edgar Degas’ dancers, Leonardo DaVinci… I saw these reproductions on the walls growing up. My maternal uncle, Nimit Abu Mazen, is an art professor, but he’s also a multimedia artist. He was born in the ‘50s, and he was a teacher for decades, but it’s important to mention that the United Nations commissioned him to do all the school boards in Arabic. For decades, he worked on that while also teaching. His production was very slow, but his work was very, very beautiful. It focused on women from Palestine… So I grew up in a very artistic household.CELINE: You mentioned restrictions on canvases. What other things was the Israeli occupation forbidding from entering the Gaza Strip when it comes to art materials?MALAK: I struggled to find canvases, especially after wars, and it took months, sometimes a year… At times, I actually had to smuggle canvases into Gaza… usually through expats who worked in Jerusalem. They bought canvases and brushes and came to Gaza. They were not checked by the soldiers, so they were able to bring art supplies. And that’s how I used to paint in 2021 because for months after the May attack, art supplies were not allowed entry… The art supply stores were bombed in 2021. There’s one store called Pins and Pens. It was in the very center of the city, and it was demolished. And there’s another art supply store that was also demolished. The destruction of art and culture has been going on for many, many years, not just since October.CELINE: Why do you think the Israeli occupation is afraid of art?MALAK: They’re afraid of humanization. I would say it’s not art in particular, but any act of us celebrating or painting or writing and sharing poetry is seen as a threat. When the state is built on the delusion that the Other or the Indigenous doesn’t matter, they are dehumanized. When the Indigenous are called vulgar and are labeled as terrorists, you strip away their humanity. So, any act of humanization becomes a threat because it radically changes the narrative. These people have artists, artistry, an art scene, and art centers. They celebrate theaters. They have book launches. They have music conservatories. Then, they’re not quite the terrorists that the media has portrayed them as…CELINE: In your paintings, you often use vivid colors and almost dream-like images. What role does symbolism play in your work? And what do you hope your viewers take away from these images?MALAK: I started painting in 2014 following the murder of my neighbor. She was standing in front of me, two blocks away, and she was torn into pieces. And growing up in the art environment, I was always painting, but not in a cathartic way and not on a daily basis. But since that time, I was driven by an urgency to make political art. I needed to find a way to survive and to distract myself from what I was seeing. There was destruction, there was blood, there was motherhood under bombardment. Then, I started gaining more attention and a following. This gave me a lot of hope. That my struggle was seen. That there were people who really cared. That gave me a sense of mission.My work started becoming more a celebration, more beautiful. I celebrated the sun, birds, the flowers, and the beauty of the landscape, which I had enjoyed growing up. But then, after October 7, I stopped using colors. I was like, khallas (in Arabic, primarily means “done,” “finished,” “it’s over,” or “enough,” Google AI). This was beyond my worst expectations. I departed from my older style, which was vivid and beautiful, because I just couldn’t see colors anymore. It’s such a depressing time. I’m now slowly going back to colors, but not with the same sense of joy, because I struggle to find joy when my people are being starved.CÉLINE: Yeah… what colors are you using now?MALAK: I am using mostly black and white. There is one I showed from 2021; it’s called You and I, which is like two figures embracing each other. And the rest was work I did recently. One of them is a large painting called Gaza. It’s a Phoenix with other elements.CÉLINE: What is coming for you in the next few months? Your career as an artist has been blossoming. You just illustrated the book of Francesca Albanese (an Italian legal scholar and expert on human rights who has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories since May 1, 2022, Wikipedia). How did that come about? You and Francesca collaborating together, and what’s coming up for you in the next six months?MALAK: I met Francesca back in 2010. There is a chapter in her book about how we met, about my life story, and our first meeting in London. When exhibition that the school held, and Francesca was visiting. She asked me if I was selling my work. And I was like, no, they’re not for sale. I was very shy, but then a few years later, she discovered my work, and she made the connection that I was the same child she had met back in 2010, and then we met in London. We spoke, I went to her events, and we had dinners together. And, yeah, before the book came about, she said that she would love to have my work on the cover.CÉLINE: I love that for you. In the face of ongoing displacement and violence in Palestine, how do you see your work being of service… I think you touched on it in the beginning, saying that it’s the humanization. But if you can expand a little bit more on that and tell me how your work is really an instrument of the liberation.MALAK: Two million people are starving. When I think of that, it makes me feel that I’m not really doing anything, and then I’m dismissive of my work. I’m being honest. I’m just really doing my role as an artist. Yes, I’m part of the culture. But it’s hard for me to say anything when the genocide is still running, when people are really starving. I don’t feel like liberation can happen from London; I don’t think liberation happens from Paris. We’re protesting, and that’s what we should do. It’s an active protest. In this moment of our history, we are in so much pain and so much trauma…CÉLINE: I also feel like we are not doing anything or enough. Nothing feels enough. How do you feel about that?MALAK: It sucks. It’s like this feeling of helplessness. But I also don’t blame myself, because I know that it’s bigger than us.CÉLINE: Did you lose your home?MALAK: The family house: it has been flattened. My uncle’s collection, the work he collected… it has all been flattened.CÉLINE: Oh my God, I’m so sorry. How long have you been in London?MALAK: I left the day before the seventh of October.CÉLINE: Oh, my God, really? How did you manage to leave?MALAK: I was doing my Master of Fine Arts in London at Central Saint Martins. And I was supposed to leave in September, and I couldn’t; I went to the border, and they sent me back. They finally let me cross the border on the fifth of October, through Jordan, and then the sixth of October was officially my first day in London.CÉLINE: And the next day, October 7.MALAK: I saw the news, and I was like, I’ve got things to do. I’m running late to my class. But then my mom texted me. She said, the minute I left, they bombed my school. Then they started their evacuation journey. The men got separated from the women, and then they all went south. I come from the north, from Gaza City. But they all went south and stayed there for months, and then they managed to leave.CÉLINE: Now they are gone?MALAK: Yeah, they are. They left in March 2024, to Egypt for one year, and they came to London just last month. Yes, we are united. And I had to go to the court to bring them here legally, because they were not allowed entry to the UK. Their visas were rejected. So we had to fight for that family reunification." } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "What We Can Learn from the Inuit Mapping of the Arctic", "author" : "William Rankin", "category" : "excerpts", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/inuit-mapping-arctic", "date" : "2025-12-02 12:49:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover%20-%20Radical%20Cartography%20%5B9780525559795%5D.jpg", "excerpt" : "This excerpt is from RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY by William Rankin, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by William Rankin.", "content" : "This excerpt is from RADICAL CARTOGRAPHY by William Rankin, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by William Rankin.In 1994, the Berkeley geographer Bernard Nietschmann made a famous claim about the power of mapping in the global struggle for Indigenous rights. It was a claim about how the tools of historical oppression could be reclaimed by the oppressed: “More Indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns. This assertion has its corollary: more Indigenous territory can be defended and reclaimed by maps than by guns.” The idea was that by putting themselves on the map—documenting their lives and their communities—Indigenous peoples would not be so easy to erase. Nietschmann was working in Central America, often heroically, during a time of violence and displacement, and he inspired a generation of researchers and activists interested in flipping the power structure of state-centric cartography on its head.But despite the spread of bottom-up mapping projects in the past 30 years, perhaps the most successful example of Indigenous mapping actually predates Nietschmann’s call to action. Just one year prior, in 1993, the Inuit of northern Canada signed a treaty creating the territory of Nunavut—the largest self-governing Indigenous territory in the world—and mapping was central to both the negotiation and the outcome. It remains one of the rare cases of Indigenous geographic knowledge decolonizing the world map.So why hasn’t the Inuit project been replicable elsewhere, despite decades more work on Indigenous mapping? The answer lies in the very idea of territory itself, and in particular in one of the most threatened parts of the Inuit landscape today: ice. The winter extent of Arctic sea ice reached a record low earlier this year, and a new low is predicted for the winter ahead. Yet the shrinking ice isn’t just an unshakable sign of Arctic warming; it’s also a poignant reminder of what Nietschmann got right—and what he missed—about the relationship between cartography and power. In particular, it shows how Inuit conceptions of space, place, and belonging are rooted in a dynamic, seasonal geography that’s often completely invisible on Western-style maps.The story begins in the 1970s, when the young Inuit leader Tagak Curley, today considered a “living father” of Nunavut, hired the Arctic anthropologist Milton Freeman to lead a collaborative mapping project of unprecedented scope and ambition. Freeman taught at McMaster University about an hour outside Toronto; he was white, but his wife, Mini Aodla Freeman, was Inuit (she was a translator and later a celebrated writer). Freeman assembled a team of other anthropologists and Arctic geographers—also white—to split the mapping into regions. They called their method the “map biography.” The goal was to capture the life history of every Inuit hunter in cartographic form, recording each person’s memories of where, at any point in their life, they had found roughly three dozen species of wildlife—from caribou and ptarmigan to beluga, narwhal, and seaweed. Each map biography would be a testimony of personal experience.After the mapping was split into regions, about 150 field-workers—almost all Inuit—traveled between 33 northern settlements with a stack of government-issued topographic maps to conduct interviews. Each hunter was asked to draw lines or shapes directly on the maps with colored pens or pencils. The interviewers stayed about 10 weeks in each settlement, visiting most hunters in their own homes, and the final participation rate was an astonishing 85 percent of all adult Inuit men. They collected 1,600 biographies in total, some on maps as large as 10 feet square.Then came the cartographers, back in Ontario: one professor and a team of about 15 students. The first map below (Figure 1) shows how the individual map biographies were transformed into summary maps, one for each community. For every species, the overlap of all hunters’ testimony became a single blob, and then blobs for all species were overlaid to make a complete map. The second map (Figure 2) shows one of the finished atlas pages along the Northwest Passage. The immediate impression is that the Arctic is in no way an empty expanse of barren land and unclaimed mineral riches. It is dense with human activity, necessary for personal and collective survival. The community maps combined to show almost uninterrupted Inuit presence stretching from northern Labrador to the Alaska border.Figure 1: Top left is a simplified version of a “map biography” from a single Inuit hunter, showing his birthplace and the places he hunted caribou, fox, wolf, grizzly bear, moose, and fish at various points in his life. (The original biography would have been drawn over a familiar government-issued topographic map.) The other three maps show how multiple biographies were then combined into patterned blobs for all hunters and all species. (Map courtesy of William Rankin/ Penguin Random House LLC.)Figure 2: A two-page spread from the finished atlas showing the seven kinds of animals hunted from the settlements of Igloolik and Hall Beach, in an area about 500 by 300 miles: caribou, polar bear, walrus, whale, fish, seal, and waterfowl. (Because of the large number of individual species recorded in the map biographies, some species were grouped together in the final maps.) The blobs are a strong, even overpowering figure atop an unusually subtle ground. Notice in particular how difficult it is to distinguish land and water areas, since the dark shading extends beyond coastlines even for individual species. This map in fact includes the Northwest Passage—the famous sea route around the tip of North America—but the crucial Fury and Hecla Strait (named after the two British ships that first learned of, but did not navigate, the passage in 1822) is almost entirely obscured. (Map courtesy of William Rankin/ Penguin Random House LLC.)Nothing about the cartography was meant to be subversive—or even controversial. For the cartographers, the only message was that the Inuit hunted a variety of species over large areas. But look again at the finished map in Figure 2. Yes, a foreground is layered over a background in the usual way, but the visual argument is strikingly different from a typical layered map in, say, a census atlas, where the foreground data doesn’t stray beyond crisp pre-existing borders. Here, in contrast, even the basic distinction between land and water is often obscure. The maps’ content is the facts of species and area; the maps’ argument is that Inuit culture is grounded in a substantially different understanding of territory than the one Western cartography was designed to show.As a result, this new atlas shifted the negotiations between the Inuit and the Canadian government decisively. Not only did the maps provide a legal claim to the Inuit-used land, documenting 750,000 square miles—an area the size of Mexico—but also a claim to the sea, showing an additional 325,000 square miles offshore.It took many years for the full implications to play out, but the erosion of the land–water boundary became central to the Inuit vision. At the time, wildlife on land was managed by the regional Northwest Territories government, while offshore marine species were the responsibility of centralized federal agencies. The Inuit used the atlas to win agreement for a new agency with equal responsibility over both. At the same time, the Inuit also improved their position by offering their offshore claims as evidence the Canadian government would use—not just in the 1980s, but even as recently as 2024—to resist foreign encroachment in the Northwest Passage. The final agreement in 1993 granted the Inuit $1.15 billion in cash, title to about 17 percent of the land in the “settlement area,” representation on several new management agencies, a share of all natural-resource revenue, broad hunting and fishing rights, and a promise that the territory of Nunavut would come into being on April 1, 1999.It’s easy to count this project as a success story, but it’s also important to remember that it depended both on the government’s own interest in negotiation and on the willingness of Indigenous peoples, or at least their leadership, to translate their sense of space onto a map, solidifying what had previously been fluid. It also meant abandoning claims to ancestral lands that had not been used in living experience and provoking new boundary disputes with neighboring, and previously amicable, Indigenous groups. These tradeoffs have led some scholars to critique mapping as only “drawing Indigenous peoples into a modern capitalist economy while maintaining the centrality of state power.” But for the Inuit, the alternatives seemed quite a bit worse.With the more recent proliferation of Indigenous mapping initiatives elsewhere—in Latin America, Africa, and Asia—the tradeoffs have been harder to evaluate. Most governments have shown little interest in addressing Indigenous claims, and when bottom-up mapping has been pushed instead by international nonprofits interested in environmental conservation, the downsides of mapping have often come without any of the upsides.Yet it’s not just the attitude of the state that’s been different; it’s also the cartography. In nearly all these other cases, the finished maps have shown none of the territorial inversion of the Inuit atlas. Instead, Indigenous knowledge is either overlaid on an existing base map in perfectly legible form, or it’s used to construct a new base map of a remarkably conventional sort, using the same visual vocabulary as Western maps.Did the Inuit project just show the data so clearly that its deeper implications were immediately apparent? No, not really, since the great irony here is that the cartographers were in fact quite dissatisfied. Follow-up surveys reached the conclusion that the atlas was only “moderately successful” by their usual mapmaking standards.The Inuit atlas was a kind of happy accident—one that doesn’t conform to any of the usual stories about Indigenous mapping, in Canada or elsewhere. The lesson here isn’t that maps should be as Indigenous as possible, or that they should be as orthodox as possible. These maps were neither. My take is simpler: the atlas shows that maps can, in fact, support alternative conceptions of space—and that showing space in a different way is crucial.The possibilities aren’t endless, but they’re broader than we might think. Plotting different sorts of data is a necessary step, but no less important are the relationships between that data and the assumptions of what lies below. For the Inuit, these assumptions were about land, water, and territory. These were in the background both visually and politically, and they were upstaged by an unexpectedly provocative foreground. The layers did not behave as they were meant to, and despite the tradeoffs, they allowed an Indigenous community to fight for their home and their way of life." } , { "title" : "Malcolm X and Islam: U.S. Islamophobia Didn’t Start with 9/11", "author" : "Collis Browne", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/malcolm-x-and-islam", "date" : "2025-11-27 14:58:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/life-malcolm-3.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "Anti-Muslim hate has been deeply engrained and intertwined with anti-Black racism in the United States for well over 60 years, far longer than most of us are taught or are aware.As the EIP team dug into design research for the new magazine format of our first anniversary issue, we revisited 1960s issues of LIFE magazine—and landed on the March 1965 edition, published just after the assassination of Malcolm X.The reporting is staggering in its openness: blatantly anti-Black and anti-Muslim in a way that normalizes white supremacy at its most fundamental level. The anti-Blackness, while horrifying, is not surprising. This was a moment when, despite the formal dismantling of Jim Crow, more than 10,000 “sundown towns” still existed across the country, segregation remained the norm, and racial terror structured daily life.What shocked our team was the nakedness of the anti-Muslim propaganda.This was not yet framed as anti-Arab in the way Western Islamophobia is often framed today. Arab and Middle Eastern people were not present in the narrative at all. Instead, what was being targeted was organized resistance to white supremacy—specifically, the adoption of Islam by Black communities as a source of political power, dignity, and self-determination. From this moment, we can trace a clear ideological line from anti-Muslim sentiment rooted in anti-Black racism in the 1960s to the anti-Arab, anti-MENA, and anti-SWANA racism that saturates Western culture today.The reporting leaned heavily on familiar colonial tropes: the implication of “inter-tribal” violence, the suggestion that resistance to white supremacy is itself a form of reverse racism or inherent aggression, and the detached, almost smug tone surrounding the violent death of a cultural leader.Of course, the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad represent only expressions within an immense and diverse global Muslim world—spanning Morocco, Sudan, the Gulf, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, and far beyond. Yet U.S. cultural and military power has long blurred these distinctions, collapsing complexity into a singular enemy image.It is worth naming this history clearly and connecting the dots: U.S. Islamophobia did not begin with 9/11. It is rooted in a much older racial project—one that has always braided anti-Blackness and anti-Muslim sentiment together in service of white supremacy, at home and abroad." } , { "title" : "The Billionaire Who Bought the Met Gala: What the Bezoses’ Check Means for Fashion’s Future", "author" : "Louis Pisano", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/the-billionaire-who-bought-the-met-gala", "date" : "2025-11-27 10:41:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_TBesos_MET_Galajpg.jpg", "excerpt" : "On the morning of November 17, 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos would serve as the sole lead sponsors of the 2026 Met Gala and its accompanying Costume Institute exhibition, “Costume Art”. Saint Laurent and Condé Nast were listed as supporting partners. To be clear, this is not a co-sponsorship. It is not “in association with.” It is the first time in the modern history of the gala that the headline slot, previously occupied by Louis Vuitton, TikTok, or a discreet old-money surname, has been handed to a tech billionaire and his wife. The donation amount remains undisclosed, but sources familiar with the negotiations place it comfortably north of seven figures, in line with the checks that helped the event raise $22 million last year.", "content" : "On the morning of November 17, 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos would serve as the sole lead sponsors of the 2026 Met Gala and its accompanying Costume Institute exhibition, “Costume Art”. Saint Laurent and Condé Nast were listed as supporting partners. To be clear, this is not a co-sponsorship. It is not “in association with.” It is the first time in the modern history of the gala that the headline slot, previously occupied by Louis Vuitton, TikTok, or a discreet old-money surname, has been handed to a tech billionaire and his wife. The donation amount remains undisclosed, but sources familiar with the negotiations place it comfortably north of seven figures, in line with the checks that helped the event raise $22 million last year.Within hours of the announcement, the Met’s Instagram post was overrun with comments proclaiming the gala “dead.” On TikTok and X, users paired declarations of late-stage capitalism with memes of the museum staircase wrapped in Amazon boxes. Not that this was unexpected. Anyone paying attention could see it coming for over a decade.When billionaires like Bezos, whose Amazon warehouses reported injury rates nearly double the industry average in 2024 and whose fashion supply chain has been linked to forced labor and poverty wages globally, acquire influence over prestigious institutions like the Met Museum through sponsorships, it risks commodifying fashion as a tool for not only personal but corporate image-laundering. To put it simply: who’s going to bite the hand that feeds them? Designers, editors, and curators will have little choice but to turn a blind eye to keep the money flowing and the lights on.Back in 2012, Amazon co-chaired the “Schiaparelli and Prada” gala, and honorary chair Jeff Bezos showed up in a perfectly respectable tux with then-wife MacKenzie Scott by his side and an Anna Wintour-advised pocket square. After his divorce from Scott in 2019, Bezos made a solo appearance at the Met Gala, signaling that he was becoming a familiar presence in fashion circles on his own. Of course, by that point, he already had Lauren Sánchez. Fast forward to 2020: print advertising was crumbling, and Anna Wintour co-signed The Drop, a set of limited CFDA collections sold exclusively on Amazon, giving the company a veneer of fashion credibility. By 2024, Sánchez made her Met debut in a mirrored Oscar de la Renta gown personally approved by Wintour, signaling that the Bezos orbit was now squarely inside the fashion world.Then, the political world started to catch up, as it always does. In January 2025, Sánchez and Bezos sat three rows behind President-elect Donald Trump at the inauguration. Amazon wrote a one-million-dollar check to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Bezos, once mocked by Trump as “Jeff Bozo,” publicly congratulated Trump on an “extraordinary political comeback.” By June 2025, Bezos and Sánchez became cultural and political mainstays: Sánchez married Bezos in Venice, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana gown Wintour had helped select. This landed Sánchez the digital cover of American Vogue almost immediately afterward. Wintour quietly handed day-to-day control of the magazine to Chloe Malle but kept the Met Gala, the global title, and her Condé Nast equity stake, cementing a new era of fashion power where money, influence, and optics are inseparable.Underneath all of it, the quiet hum of Amazon’s fashion machine continued to whirr. By 2024, the company already controlled 16.2 percent of every dollar Americans spent on clothing, footwear, and accessories—more than Walmart, Target, Macy’s, and Nordstrom combined. That same year, it generated $34.7 billion in U.S. apparel and footwear revenue that year, with the women’s category alone on pace to top $40 billion. No legacy house has ever had that volume of real-time data on what people actually try on, keep, or return in shame. Amazon can react in weeks rather than seasons, reordering winning pieces, tweaking existing ones, and killing unpopular options before they’re even produced at scale.Wintour did more than simply observe this shift; she engineered a soft landing by bringing Amazon in when it was still somewhat uncool and seen mostly as a discount retailer, lending it credibility when it needed legitimacy, and spending the last two years turning Sánchez from tabloid footnote to Vogue cover star. The Condé Nast sale rumors that began circulating in July 2025, complete with talk of Wintour cashing out her equity and Sánchez taking a creative role, have been denied by every official mouthpiece. But they have also refused to die, because the timeline is simply too tidy.The clearest preview of what billionaire ownership can do to a cultural institution remains Bezos’ other pet project, The Washington Post. Bezos bought it for $250 million in 2013, saved it from bankruptcy, and built it into a profitable digital operation with 2.5 million subscribers. Then, in October 2024, he personally blocked a planned editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris. More than 250,000 subscribers canceled in the following days. By February 2025, the opinion section was restructured around “personal liberties and free markets,” triggering another exodus and the resignation of editorial page editor David Shipley. Former executive editor Marty Baron called it “craven.” The timing, just months after Bezos began warming to the incoming Trump administration, was not lost on anyone. The story didn’t stop there: in the last few days, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance revealed he had texted Bezos suggesting the hiring of a right-leaning Breitbart journalist, Matthew Boyle, to run the Post’s political coverage. This is a clear signal of how staffing decisions at a storied paper now sit within the same power matrix that funds the Met Gala and shapes culture, media, and politics alike. It’s a tangled, strategic web—all of Bezos’ making.It’s curious that, in the same 30-day window that the Trump DOJ expanded its antitrust inquiry into Amazon, specifically how its algorithms favor its own products over third-party sellers, including many fashion brands, the MET, a city-owned museum, handed the keys of its marquee event to the man whose company now wields outsized influence over designers’ fortunes and faces regulatory scrutiny from the administration he helped reinstall. This is not sponsorship; it’s leverage. Wintour once froze Melania Trump out of Vogue because she could afford to.But she cannot freeze out Sánchez or Bezos. Nor does she want to.So on the first Monday in May, the museum doors will open as they always do for the Met Gala. The carpet will still be red (or whatever color the theme demands). The photographs of celebrities posing in their interpretations of “Costume Art” will still break the internet. Andrew Bolton’s exhibition, roughly 200 objects tracing the dressed body across five millennia, displayed in the newly renamed Condé Nast Galleries, will still be brilliant. But the biggest check will come from the couple who already control 16 percent of America’s clothing spend, who own The Washington Post, and who sat three rows behind Trump at the inauguration. Everything else, guest list tweaks, livestream deals, shoppable moments, will flow from that single source of money and power. That is who now has the final word on the most influential night in American fashion." } ] }